ZAHIRU’D-DIN MUHAMMAD BABUR(1483-
1530), a descendant of Genghis Khan, was a
warlord from Central Asia who invaded In-
dia and founded the Mughal dynasty. He
kept a record of his life, now known as “The
Babur Nama.”
In it we witness him doing things war-
lords were wont to do: foe-crushing, plun-
dering, head-lopping, flaying, impaling and
so forth. One didn’t want to give one’s ene-
mies the impression one was soft.
It’s possible, I suppose, to come to “The
Babur Nama” and read it as a work of mili-
tary and political history. There is much to
learn about sieges and catapults and flank-
ing maneuvers and the realities of leading
tens of thousands of hairy, hungry, rowdy,
reeking men. There are fantastic achieve-
ments in corpse-making.
But the reason “The Babur Nama”
speaks intimately across the centuries —
the reason this book has been compared to
the diaries of Samuel Pepys — is how intelli-
gent, humane, self-critical and even light-
souled it is.
Published now in a new edition from Ev-
eryman’s Library, “The Babur Nama” is
how Pepys might read if every 50 pages or
so he ordered his men to build towers of his
enemy’s skulls.
Babur is charming and surprisingly mod-
ern company on the page. His name, among
Western readers, deserves to be better
known. If you only read one autobiography
from a sensitive 16th-century warlord this
year, make it this one.
Babur got back pain. When on boats, he
lost things overboard. He broke a tooth
while eating, and it was a bummer. He
caught colds. He suffered thieves. (“That
day someone stole the gold clasp of my gir-
dle.”) He threw a punch and dislocated a fin-
ger. He got lost outside at night. He worried
about his diet. (“This year I began to ab-
stain from all doubtful food.”) He wept
easily.
He was a great lover of jokes and harm-
less pranks. His mind was well-stocked
with quotations of all varieties, and also
with poems. Among the snippets of verse he
summoned to mind, at an appropriate mo-
ment, was this one:I am drunk, Inspector, today keep your
hand off me,
Inspect me on the day you catch me
sober.Babur wrote verse of his own, and he was
an erudite critic of the form. About one poet,
he wrote: “His odes are tasty but better-fla-
vored than correct.” About another: “Not to
compose is better than to compose verse
such as his.”He liked games of intellect. About an avid
chess player, he wrote: “He was madly fond
of chess, so much so that if he had met two
players, he would hold one by the skirt
while he played his game out with the other,
as much as to say, ‘Don’t go!’ ”
A polymath in the Jeffersonian style, Ba-
bur cared about architecture, urban plan-
ning, gardens, trees and fresh produce. He
prized one variety of plum because it was
“an excellent laxative medicine.” He seized
a fort with ladders and, in the next sentence,
rejoiced that it was melon season. A friend
brought him fresh lotus seeds, which he
called “first-rate little things just like pista-
chios.”
Babur was more Hal than Falstaff, and he
didn’t like to be around drunken fools. But
when he threw a party, it was a memorable
party. (“People had brought a few beast-
loads of wine from Nur-valley.”) There is a
very funny passage in which he admits:
“Very drunk I must have been for, when
they told me next day that we had galloped
loose-rein into camp, carrying torches, I
could not recall it in the very least. After
reaching my quarters, I vomited a good
deal.”
Babur preferred the gentler highs deliv-
ered by hashish and opium. He relates get-
ting stoned with a librarian. He liked to in-
gest what he and his friends called confec-
tions. Here is a typical aside: “That day con-
fection was eaten. While under its influence
wonderful fields of flowers were enjoyed.”
He had wives but admitted to other infat-
uations. He called the keeping of catamites
a “vile practice,” yet, at one moment, admits
to falling so heavily in love with a boy that
“to look straight at him or to put words to-
gether was impossible.” Lost in his swim-
ming emotions, “like the madmen, I used to
wander alone over hill and plain.”
He was a gifted travel writer. He took note
of good cooks and bakers and paper mak-
ers. He was a raker-in of delights. But, as
with nearly all travel writers, he’s most viv-
id when a place disappoints:Hindustan is a country of few charms.
Its people have no good looks; of
social intercourse, paying and
receiving visits there is none; of
genius and capacity none; of
manners none; in handicraft and
work there is no form or symmetry,
method or quality; there are no good
horses, no good dogs, no grapes,
musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no
ice or cold water, no good bread or
cooked food in the bazaars, no
hot-baths, no colleges, no candles,
torches or candlesticks.About Hindustan, he is just getting
warmed up.
This volume reintroduces readers to this
adroit translation by Annette Susannah
Beveridge (1842-1929). The historian
William Dalrymple, who contributes a
sturdy new introduction, notes that Bever-
idge was the first translator of “The Babur
Nama” into English from the original Turki,
and was “a most unusual memsahib.”
Born in England, she arrived in India at
30 and fought for the education of women
there. She composed her translation over
many years; I would read a memoir about
the feat. Her footnotes are both scholarly
and winsome. Don’t skip them. She calls out
overstatements and corrects facts. She
makes comments like, “This puzzling word
might mean cow-horn.” You sense she is en-
joying Babur’s company, too.
Babur was liberal and tolerant for his
time. There are many moments of forgive-
ness in “The Babur Nama,” of generosity
and fellow feeling. But woe to those who
crossed him.
After barely surviving an attempted poi-
soning, he pounced on the culprits and de-
tailed the wet stuff of his retaliation. “That
taster I had cut in pieces, that cook skinned
alive,” he wrote. “One of those women I had
thrown under an elephant, the other shot
with a matchlock.”
A warlord, it seems, had to warlord.DWIGHT GARNER BOOKS OF THE TIMESWhen Not Piling Up Corpses, a Charming Sort of Fellow
The memoir of a warlord from
Central Asia is surprisingly
modern and self-critical.
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter:
@DwightGarner.
The Babur Nama
Translated, edited and
annotated by Annette
Susannah Beveridge
938 pages. Everyman’s
Library/Alfred A. Knopf. $30.William Dalrymple wrote the introduction for
the new edition of “The Babur Nama.”JERRY BAUERthemselves, with help from a remote team
that included technical designers and a cho-
reographer.
The resulting hybrid of theater, move-
ment and video — Shaw, 76, called it a Zoom
movie, or Zoomie — is not just one of the 40-
year-old company’s best pieces but among
the most evocative art to emerge from the
Covid era; it is streaming on the La MaMa
website, lamama.org, through Dec. 12.
The title, which came early in the process,
proved premonitory.
“We were looking at the backdrop of cli-
mate change, the integration of our aging
process, Peggy saying it was going to be her
last show, the last gasp of democracy, may-
be,” Weaver said. “Then we found ourselves
in a pandemic, where you couldn’t breathe,
and in a civil unrest that was symbolized by
‘I can’t breathe.’
“And then we found ourselves in a house
that was also in its last gasp,” she added.
“We had no idea these things would come
together in that way when we named the
show over a year ago.”
That is a lot to unpack, yet “Last Gasp
WFH” is remarkably light on its feet. For
starters, the 90-minute piece looks effort-
lessly striking because Weaver and Shaw
position themselves perfectly within the
frame, coming up with almost painterly
compositions. “We have a spatial aware-
ness that we obviously bring to our theater
and performance,” Weaver said, “but may-
be being able to see ourselves in the frame
had something to do with it.”
The fleet, surprisingly entertaining mov-
ie is alternately playful, surreal, pointed
and poignant, and its nonlinear scenes in-
corporate many of Split Britches’ calling
cards: autobiography, sly humor, pop-cul-
ture references (Bill Withers to Beyoncé)
and questioning of gender.
This makes Weaver’s matter-of-fact men-
tion that the project would be Shaw’s last
performance all the more bittersweet. Shaw
has long been a singular presence on the
American theater scene, a butch lesbian
who has regularly explored her identity in
such pieces as “Menopausal Gentleman.”
Then again, “Peggy has said this is her
last show since we started working togeth-
er 40 years ago,” Weaver said, laughing.
“This is her coping mechanism.”
Yes, but what if she really means it now?
“For whatever reason, if it’s the last one, I
feel really happy that it exists in this form
and that it’s manifested itself in this way,”
Weaver said. “I feel really pleased with the
way it is.”
Shaw, who was just off-camera, piped in:
“We’ll make another movie.” (She and
Weaver were calling from their Catskills
house; they also each have a studio in the
East Village of Manhattan.)
“Peggy, you can come and sit here,”
Weaver reminded her, before reorientingthe laptop so Shaw could be onscreen. “I
knew this was going to happen,” she added
dryly, clearly aware her charismatic, witty
accomplice would not be able to remain qui-
et for long.
Shaw, who had a stroke in 2011 (a setback
she explored in the solo show “Ruff”), can’t
memorize lines anymore. In “Last Gasp
WFH,” she wears big headphones to listen
to the words Weaver feeds her during
monologues.
There is no attempt to hide what’s going
on.
“I couldn’t fit little headphones into my
ears because I already have hearing aids,”
Shaw said. “Johnnie Ray had a big hearing
aid in the 1950s in order to perform,” she
continued, referring to a partly deaf singer
whom she name-checks in the piece.
“The other thing is, that was the only pair
of headphones we had. Like, we just wore
black [in the movie] because we didn’t have
anything with us from the show, except the
yellow slicker and the yellow boots, in caseit rained or something.”
In scenes they shared, Weaver couldn’t
also be reading out Shaw’s lines. So they
scrawled them on paper and taped the
pages to a wall.
“We were trying to act a scene we
adapted from ‘Marriage Story,’ ” Weaver
said, referring to the Noah Baumbach film
about a divorcing couple. “It’s such an
iconic fight between two people, and the
subject was the same one that we have: We
have had affairs and fights about it. We have
conflicts over the fact that Peggy gets
awards and I don’t, even though we work to-
gether.”
In many ways, “Last Gasp WFH” feels
like a culmination for Split Britches — even
though it’s not in the company’s usual medi-
um. “We know and trust our methods now,”
Weaver explained. “And in this case, we had
the opportunity to fine-tune them in ways
that we don’t often get to fine-tune them on
the stage. I don’t think we know how to do
anything else.”A Project Shaped
By These Times
‘For whatever reason, if it’s the last one, I feel really happy that it exists in this form.’
LOIS WEAVERCONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Last Gasp WFH
Available on demand through Dec. 12;
lamama.org.
PHOTOGRAPHS VIA SPLIT BRITCHESJINGYU LIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAbove, Peggy Shaw, left, and
Lois Weaver. Top left, scenes
from “Last Gasp WFH,” which
the duo performed in a nearly
empty London home and
recorded on Zoom.C6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2020